Atonement (16 page)

So it should have been a simple matter, to pick her way down the bank and go across the grass towards the temple. But
again, she hesitated, and simply looked, without even calling out to the twins. The building's indistinct pallor shimmered in the dark. When she stared at it directly it dissolved completely. It stood about a hundred feet away, and nearer, in the centre of the grassy stretch, there was a shrub she did not remember. Or rather, she remembered it being closer to the shore. The trees were not right either, what she could see of them. The oak was too bulbous, the elm too straggly, and in their strangeness they seemed in league. As she put her hand out to touch the parapet of the bridge, a duck startled her with a high, unpleasant call, almost human in its breathy downward note. It was the steepness of the bank, of course, which held her back, and the idea of descent, and the fact that there was not much point. But she had made her decision. She went down backwards, steadying herself on clumps of grass, and at the bottom paused only to wipe her hands on her dress.

She walked directly towards the temple, and had gone seven or eight steps, and was about to call out the names of the twins, when the bush that lay directly in her path – the one she thought should be closer to the shore – began to break up in front of her, or double itself, or waver, and then fork. It was changing its shape in a complicated way, thinning at the base as a vertical column rose five or six feet. She would have stopped immediately had she not still been so completely bound to the notion that this was a bush, and that she was witnessing some trick of darkness and perspective. Another second or two, another couple of steps, and she saw that this was not so. Then she stopped. The vertical mass was a figure, a person who was now backing away from her and beginning to fade into the darker background of the trees. The remaining darker patch on the ground was also a person, changing shape again as it sat up and called her name.

‘Briony?'

She heard the helplessness in Lola's voice – it was the sound she had thought belonged to a duck – and in an instant, Briony understood completely. She was nauseous with disgust and
fear. Now the larger figure reappeared, circling right round the edge of the clearing and heading for the bank down which she had just come. She knew she should attend to Lola, but she could not help watching as he mounted the slope quickly and without effort, and disappeared onto the roadway. She heard his footsteps as he strode towards the house. She had no doubt. She could describe him. There was nothing she could not describe. She knelt down beside her cousin.

‘Lola. Are you all right?'

Briony touched her shoulder, and was groping for her hand without success. Lola was sitting forward, with her arms crossed around her chest, hugging herself and rocking slightly. The voice was faint and distorted, as though impeded by something like a bubble, some mucus in her throat. She needed to clear her throat. She said, vaguely, ‘I'm sorry, I didn't, I'm sorry…'

Briony whispered, ‘Who was it?' and before that could be answered, she added, with all the calm she was capable of, ‘I saw him. I
saw
him.'

Meekly, Lola said, ‘Yes.'

For the second time that evening, Briony felt a flowering of tenderness for her cousin. Together they faced real terrors. She and her cousin were close. Briony was on her knees, trying to put her arms round Lola and gather her to her, but the body was bony and unyielding, wrapped tight about itself like a seashell. A winkle. Lola hugged herself and rocked.

Briony said, ‘It was him, wasn't it?'

She felt against her chest, rather than saw, her cousin nod, slowly, reflectively. Perhaps it was exhaustion.

After many seconds Lola said in the same weak, submissive voice, ‘Yes. It was him.'

Suddenly, Briony wanted her to say his name. To seal the crime, frame it with the victim's curse, close his fate with the magic of naming.

‘Lola,' she whispered, and could not deny the strange elation she felt. ‘Lola. Who was it?'

The rocking stopped. The island became very still. Without quite shifting her position, Lola seemed to move away, or to move her shoulders, half shrug, half sway, to free herself of Briony's sympathetic touch. She turned her head away and looked out across the emptiness where the lake was. She may have been about to speak, she may have been about to embark upon a long confession in which she would find her feelings as she spoke them and lead herself out of her numbness towards something that resembled both terror and joy. Turning away may well have been not a distancing, but an act of intimacy, a way of gathering herself to begin to speak her feelings to the only person she thought, so far from home, she could trust herself to talk to. Perhaps she had already drawn breath and parted her lips. But it did not matter because Briony was about to cut her off and the opportunity would be lost. So many seconds had passed – thirty? forty-five? – and the younger girl could no longer hold herself back. Everything connected. It was her own discovery. It was her story, the one that was writing itself around her.

‘It was Robbie, wasn't it?'

The maniac. She wanted to say the word.

Lola said nothing and did not move.

Briony said it again, this time without the trace of a question. It was a statement of fact. ‘It was Robbie.'

Though she had not turned, or moved at all, it was clear that something was changing in Lola, a warmth rising from her skin and a sound of dry swallowing, a heaving convulsion of muscle in her throat that was audible as a series of sinewy clicks.

Briony said it again. Simply. ‘Robbie.'

From far out in the lake came the fat, rounded plop of a fish jumping, a precise and solitary sound, for the breeze had dropped away completely. Nothing scary in the treetops or among the sedge now. At last Lola turned slowly to face her.

She said, ‘You saw him.'

‘How could he,' Briony moaned. ‘How dare he.'

Lola placed her hand on her bare forearm and gripped. Her mild words were widely spaced. ‘You saw him.'

Briony drew nearer to her and covered Lola's hand with her own. ‘You don't even know yet what happened in the library, before dinner, just after we were talking. He was attacking my sister. If I hadn't come in, I don't know what he would have done…'

However close they were, it was not possible to read expressions. The dark disc of Lola's face showed nothing at all, but Briony sensed she was only half listening, and this was confirmed when she cut in to repeat, ‘But you saw him. You actually saw him.'

‘Of course I did. Plain as day. It was him.'

Despite the warmth of the night, Lola was beginning to shiver and Briony longed for something she could take off and place round her shoulders.

Lola said, ‘He came up behind me, you see. He knocked me to the ground…and then…he pushed my head back and his hand was over my eyes. I couldn't actually, I wasn't able…'

‘Oh Lola.' Briony put out her hand to touch her cousin's face and found her cheek. It was dry, but it wouldn't be, she knew it wouldn't be for long. ‘Listen to me. I couldn't mistake him. I've known him all my life. I saw him.'

‘Because I couldn't say for sure. I mean, I thought it might be him by his voice.'

‘What did he say?'

‘Nothing. I mean, it was the sound of his voice, breathing, noises. But I couldn't see. I couldn't say for sure.'

‘Well I can. And I will.'

And so their respective positions, which were to find public expression in the weeks and months to come, and then be pursued as demons in private for many years afterwards, were established in these moments by the lake, with Briony's certainty rising whenever her cousin appeared to doubt herself. Nothing much was ever required of Lola after that, for she
was able to retreat behind an air of wounded confusion, and as treasured patient, recovering victim, lost child, let herself be bathed in the concern and guilt of the adults in her life. How could we have let this happen to a child? Lola could not, and did not need to, help them. Briony offered her a chance, and she seized it instinctively; less than that – she simply let it settle over her. She had little more to do than remain silent behind her cousin's zeal. Lola did not need to lie, to look her supposed attacker in the eye and summon the courage to accuse him, because all that work was done for her, innocently, and without guile by the younger girl. Lola was required only to remain silent about the truth, banish it and forget it entirely, and persuade herself not of some contrary tale, but simply of her own uncertainty. She couldn't see, his hand was over her eyes, she was terrified, she couldn't say for sure.

Briony was there to help her at every stage. As far as she was concerned, everything fitted; the terrible present fulfilled the recent past. Events she herself witnessed foretold her cousin's calamity. If only she, Briony, had been less innocent, less stupid. Now she saw, the affair was too consistent, too symmetrical to be anything other than what she said it was. She blamed herself for her childish assumption that Robbie would limit his attentions to Cecilia. What was she thinking of? He was a maniac after all. Anyone would do. And he was bound to go for the most vulnerable – a spindly girl, stumbling about in the dark in an unfamiliar place, bravely searching around the island temple for her brothers. Just as Briony herself had been about to do. That his victim could easily have been her increased Briony's outrage and fervour. If her poor cousin was not able to command the truth, then she would do it for her.
I can. And I will.

As early as the week that followed, the glazed surface of conviction was not without its blemishes and hairline cracks. Whenever she was conscious of them, which was not often, she was driven back, with a little swooping sensation in her
stomach, to the understanding that what she knew was not literally, or not only, based on the visible. It was not simply her eyes that told her the truth. It was too dark for that. Even Lola's face at eighteen inches was an empty oval, and this figure was many feet away, and turned from her as it moved back around the clearing. But nor was this figure invisible, and its size and manner of moving were familiar to her. Her eyes confirmed the sum of all she knew and had recently experienced. The truth was in the symmetry, which was to say, it was founded in common sense. The truth instructed her eyes. So when she said, over and again, I saw him, she meant it, and was perfectly honest, as well as passionate. What she meant was rather more complex than what everyone else so eagerly understood, and her moments of unease came when she felt that she could not express these nuances. She did not even seriously try. There were no opportunities, no time, no permission. Within a couple of days, no, within a matter of hours, a process was moving fast and well beyond her control. Her words summoned awful powers from the familiar and picturesque local town. It was as if these terrifying authorities, these uniformed agents, had been lying in wait behind the façades of pretty buildings for a disaster they knew must come. They knew their own minds, they knew what they wanted and how to proceed. She was asked again and again, and as she repeated herself, the burden of consistency was pressed upon her. What she had said she must say again. Minor deviations earned her little frowns on wise brows, or a degree of frostiness and withdrawal of sympathy. She became anxious to please, and learned quickly that the minor qualifications she might have added would disrupt the process that she herself had set in train.

She was like a bride-to-be who begins to feel her sickening qualms as the day approaches, and dares not speak her mind because so many preparations have been made on her behalf. The happiness and convenience of so many good people would be put at risk. These are fleeting moments of private
disquiet, only dispelled by abandoning herself to the joy and excitement of those around her. So many decent people could not be wrong, and doubts like hers, she's been told, are to be expected. Briony did not wish to cancel the whole arrangement. She did not think she had the courage, after all her initial certainty and two or three days of patient, kindly interviewing, to withdraw her evidence. However, she would have preferred to qualify, or complicate, her use of the word ‘saw'. Less like seeing, more like knowing. Then she could have left it to her interrogators to decide whether they would proceed together in the name of this kind of vision. They were impassive whenever she wavered, and firmly recalled her to her earliest statements. Was she a silly girl, their manner implied, who had wasted everybody's time? And they took an austere view of the visual. There was enough light, it was established, from stars, and from the cloud base reflecting street lights from the nearest town. Either she saw, or she did not see. There lay nothing in between; they did not say as much, but their brusqueness implied it. It was in those moments, when she felt their coolness, that she reached back to revive her first ardour and said it again. I saw him. I know it was him. Then it was comforting to feel she was confirming what they already knew.

She would never be able to console herself that she was pressured or bullied. She never was. She trapped herself, she marched into the labyrinth of her own construction, and was too young, too awestruck, too keen to please, to insist on making her own way back. She was not endowed with, or old enough to possess, such independence of spirit. An imposing congregation had massed itself around her first certainties, and now it was waiting and she could not disappoint it at the altar. Her doubts could be neutralised only by plunging in deeper. By clinging tightly to what she believed she knew, narrowing her thoughts, reiterating her testimony, she was able to keep from mind the damage she only dimly sensed she was doing. When the matter was closed, when
the sentence was passed and the congregation dispersed, a ruthless youthful forgetting, a wilful erasing, protected her well into her teens.

 

‘Well I can. And I will.'